Great fun at Rayburn these days, the water is high and frankly there are fish everywhere. You can catch them off the bank out as deep as you want. The best fishing seems to still be in and around the bushes. However we caught them everywhere, the week prior I found a spot where I caught 7 in a row on a 6XD, when I didn't get bit on cast 8 and 9 I threw a Carolina rig in and got bit another 10-12 times in a row. Three to eight pounders, I thought I had found the winning fish but as happens the bite on that spot died off. I really have no complaints, we caught 19 lbs, lots of fish, unfortunately our big fish when was a 6.88 was caught very early on a Carolina rig and she died. Not a deep hooked fish, just stressful on her and it's summer and a long day in the livewell. Actually I do have a gripe, why would they attach a 1 pound penalty to dead fish, a half a pound is bad enough. We do everything we can, we don't want dead fish, we love fish, so why punish us, especially on summer tournaments. You are the ones that put us out there this time of year, the water is mid 80's fish are going to die. Yes it cost us $1,000, but we didn't break a rule or do anything out of line, I just don't think excessive dead fish penalties benefit the fish or the tournament circuit...just my two cents...or hundred thousand cents in this case.

I guess if you aren't winning you need to be learning. Sometimes that's about how the fish act, sometimes its more self revealing. My most recent article, Rayovac Rayburn Lessons learned, Fishing for Fun vs Fishing To Win, is a bit of an introspective look at the mistakes I made prior to and at the Rayovac Tounament a few weeks ago. If you enjoy it please like it on Facebook and share with friends. 

I wrote not long ago something to the effect that I'm tired of learning lessons fishing and ready to put old lessons to use in winning. Unfortunately I demonstrated to myself at the Rayovac tournament that I still have lessons to learn. I wish I could say my poor performance was due to losing almost 3 hours day two to equipment issues, or that catching some solid post spawners in practice on a jerk bait threw me for a loop, which it did, but mostly I feel like I was mentally and physically lazy. To give you the lay of the land the lake was over 5 feet high so there was an abundance of cover in the water. If you broke through the willows and buck brush, then the thorn and sticker bushes, you could get to the hard cover, big pine trees and sweet gum trees and not only was the fishing easier, it was incredibly fun. I'm talking 40, 50, 60 bite a day fun. And I got caught up in that, even though every fish, not most fish, every fish was 2 3/4 and under. I knew the better fish were a little deeper, the first day of practice I pulled a fish between 8-12 lbs to the top off the first piece of hard cover, in this case a sweet gum tree, behind the buck brush and thorn bushes...actually I'm not sure what to call them, it was like a bail of organic barb wire laying there, really hard to get through, would literally stop a 112 MinnKota trolling motor. That was the only solid bite that day, the rest, and I looked at a lot of them, were those pound and a half and two pound fish. The third day I accidentally caught a fish that was between 5 and 6, guess where, on the first hard cover, again a sweet gum tree behind the nasty stuff. So what did I do for all the days of practice and the tournament, I fished the easy stuff where there were lots of bites...guess what I caught..lots of ound and a half and two pound fish. Now guess where all the top ten stringers were caught... 

My most recent article is up on Inside Line Magazine. It is a piece with Jay Yelas "Analyzing Top Level Tournament Strategies". Click on the title above as a link or go to "Articles" on my landing page.